Even as the Mitt Romney campaign tries to distance the GOP presidential candidate from that millionaire-Bain Capital-rich guy image, it’s “there they go again” — with a May 30 Bay Area fundraiser for Romney and his wife, Ann, at a 65,000 sq. ft. mansion called Chateau Carolands in Hillsborough.
And Ann Romney will star in her own upscale event, a “ladies luncheon” the same day — at the Palo Alto home of Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers and his wife, Elaine.

Tickets start at $1,000 for Ann’s event, and $2,500 for an evening at the Chateau with Mitt and Ann. They go all the way up to $50,000 (and come with “founder’s benefits”, according to the invites we’ve included below.)

Co-hosts for the evening Romney shindig will be former CA Gov. Pete Wilson, former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Condoleezza Rice. (Check out the whole list of Bay Area biggies sponsoring the event below).
Co-hosting the Ann Romney event is HP CEO and former gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, among other luminaries.
And take a look the location, which — can we say it? — is rather “Downton Abbey”:

Hey, we understand that both Dem and Rep political fundraisers are more often at toney locations: hello, George Clooney.
But in a week in which Team Obama is studiously trying to make Romney’s Bain/rich guy history the chief line of attack, the announcement of that over-the-top location of the Romney event is already sending some Dems into spasms of laughter.“A Chateau? How long did they have to look around to find THAT?,” laughed Wade Randlett, a tech insider and lead fundraiser for Obama today. “Maybe they can arrange to have a couple of NASCAR owners there, too.”

His take: “It’s now clear the Romney campaign is affected by Richie Rich Tourette’s Syndrome.”

The GOP presidential candidate’s Bay Area stop will also present a contrast this month: it comes just a week after President Barack Obama returns to the Bay Area on May 23. The POTUS fundraiser is at the historic Fox Theatre in Redwood City — tickets start at $250.
The Romney shindig is pricier: tickets start at $2,500 and go up to a stratospheric $50,000.
(History buffs, take note: The Chateau, on the National Register of Historic Places, has a 75 foot-high atrium which “holds the record as the largest enclosed space in an American private residence,” and is “considered a masterpiece of American Renaissance and Second Empire Beaux-Arts design.”)

UPDATE! We’ve just been informed that Carolands has even more history to report. In the mid-80s, it was dubbed “the haunted house on the hill” by cops. Seems it was the site of a gruesome crime involving the beating and stabbing of two teenaged girls by what sounds like a very creepy security guard. Here’s the link to that story.

Wanna see it? Get out the checkbook and check out the Romney invite as we got it today:

And here’s the invite for the Anne Romney event:
We’ll have more details as they develop: stay tuned.